Vik Muniz, whose work has just gone on show at IMMA, revels in sleight of hand. He tells Aidan Dunne about artistic disbelief.
It's appropriate that the official opening of Vik Muniz's exhibition at the Irish Museum of Modern Art took place on the evening of April 1st. In Muniz's photographs nothing is as it seems. An initial moment of recognition as we latch on to a familiar image quickly gives way to doubt. Yes, it's a portrait of Sigmund Freud - a well-known, iconic portrait of Freud, and it has a photographic look - but surely, impossibly, it's composed of chocolate, liquid chocolate that seems to have just coalesced momentarily, accidentally, into an image. Seeing, Muniz suggests, should be disbelieving.
A virtuoso of illusions, time and again he tricks the eye and the brain, then invites us to retrace our steps, to question our perceptive processes and ask how we could have been taken in so easily. He does all this with a light touch and a quick wit, and he's one of the few contemporary artists more likely to provoke a smile than a frown.
For some art critics this is not good. In conversation he brings the point up himself. "They say the work is populist, as if that is something bad, as if it's bad that people might like it." Perhaps there is an underlying suspicion that he is giving the game away, like a member of the Magic Circle explaining how it's all done with smoke and mirrors. Muniz, it must be said, is pretty good natured about the criticism, as he seems to be good natured and relaxed about most things.
"All interesting images are in some sense gimmicks," he says. "Perspective in Giotto, Vermeer's optical effects, all of representational painting you could see as a trick designed to trigger a physical reaction. I feel once you have them looking, then you can layer information on top of perception, but not vice versa. You can make a work that has an impeccable moral point of view, that is politically worthy and socially responsible and so on, but if it doesn't engage people to begin with it's pointless."
Although it is unfailingly accessible and playful, his work is certainly layered with information and implications, raising though not labouring all sorts of questions, from optical to philosophical. His images of minimalist sculptures in the Whitney Museum of American Art, in New York, for example, are composed of dust gathered from the rooms in which the pieces are exhibited. His portraits of the children of sugar-cane workers in the Caribbean are made with sugar, the product of their parents' toil and in all likelihood their own future, less than ideal employment.
Muniz in person is as warm and likeable as his work. He is fascinated by the business of representation and perception. Hardly surprising, perhaps, given that one of his first efforts at making a living, while still in his teens, involved analysing the siting and content of billboards in São Paulo, where he was born in 1961. His family was not well off, and it never even occurred to him that his aptitude for drawing could develop into an artistic career. He wasn't aware there was such a thing.
Having failed to get into medical school, he identified advertising as a reasonable possibility. Hence the billboard survey, which he devised. It yielded masses of material and led to work, which led to an advertising-industry award. Leaving the awards ceremony, he wandered into the middle of a fight. He tried to separate the protagonists, one of whom produced a gun and shot him. He relates all this lightly, with a smile playing at the edges of his mouth.
He made it to hospital. In fact, he passed out and crashed his car in to the gates of the hospital, injuring his head and diverting attention from the bullet wound until the doctors started to wonder where the blood was coming from. Having recovered, he was offered money not to take legal proceedings. He bought an aircraft ticket to Chicago, moving on fairly quickly to New York, where he has lived ever since.
He went to theatre and performance workshops, thinking he might do something in that direction. But "it never quite took". So, in the latter half of the 1980s, he found himself taking odd jobs in New York and enjoying "the very rich nightlife" of the time.
One of his jobs, in a frame shop in the Bronx, entailed making maritime paintings of Spanish galleons in the guise of an imaginary Flemish painter "called something like Blanchard". He says: "It happened that I started to meet more and more people who were working in the arts. I had never studied art, but I realised that through my own reading and from going to museums I knew at least as much as they did about it - and I could draw better."
He liked Jeff Koons's playful, humorous take on conceptualism. "At first I was into objects. I wanted to make real things, craft-based, handmade things. What I was thinking was that advertisers take things and create an identity for them so that we will recognise them and want them. What if the advertisers had to make the objects themselves? So I made these objects that I thought of as contemporary relics."
He had a solo show, although he wasn't entirely happy with the work. "A guy came with a four-by-five camera to photograph the pieces. Technically, they were amazing photographs, but I looked at them and thought they were just all wrong for me." So he bought a camera and took his own pictures. It was a decisive moment. "The pictures were terrible, they were all wrong, but they seemed right." He realised he was imagining his objects from a specific vantage point. The photographer and the viewer could not know that, however. So the production of the object became not a culmination but an intermediate stage on the way to a photographic image.
With that realisation, he had his basic way of working sorted out. He set about making a series of cloud photographs with cotton wool, exploiting the way we can find chance images in clouds. "Really the work started coming from there."
IMMA's show includes a representative selection from the various series he has made since. They are all remarkably inventive and ingenious. Humour is an important part of the process. "It resembles the way we tell jokes. You start to establish a structure, building it up and taking the listener with you in making this logical construction, and then you take away a vital part of the structure - and it has to collapse, but somehow it's a pleasurable thing.
"There's an ethics of illusion. Through the use of illusion we can achieve a better understanding of what reality is. I'm always playing with the viewer's trust and then betraying that trust. But in a way that's easy to assimilate. It's a kind of visual vaccine. You should end up asking, why should we trust this or any image?"
Vik Muniz's work is at IMMA, Dublin, until June 13th